The right to bear arms is a matter of individual safety and,
ultimately, freedom. The issue goes far beyond gun nuts.

The central premise of the gun control movement
is that society becomes more civilized when the citizen surrenders the means of
self-defense, leaving the state a monopoly of force.

That this premise goes largely unchallenged is the most remarkable feature of our gun
control debate. We are ending a century that has repeatedly witnessed the consequences of
unchecked state monopolies of force. University of Hawaii political scientist Rudolph J.
Rummel, one of the leading students of democide (mass murder of civilian populations by
governments), has estimated that nearly 170 million people have been murdered by their own
governments in our century. The familiar list of mass murderers--Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol
Pot--only scratches the surface. The mass slaughter of helpless, unarmed civilian
populations continues in Sudan, Rwanda, parts of the former Yugoslavia and East Timor.

The reluctance of outside forces to intervene is well documented. And yet the obvious
question is strangely absent: Would arms in the hands of average citizens have made a
difference? Could the overstretched Nazi war machine have murdered 11 million armed and
resisting Europeans while also taking on the Soviet and Anglo-American armies? Could
50,000 to 70,000 Khmer Rouge have butchered 2 million to 3 million armed Cambodians? The
answers are by no means clear, but it is unconscionable that they are not being asked.

Need Americans have such concerns? We have been spared rule by dictators, but state
tyranny can come in other forms. It can come when government refuses to protect unpopular
groups--people who are disfavored because of their political or religious beliefs, their
ancestry or the color of their skin. Our past has certainly not been free of this brand of
state tyranny. In the Jim Crow South, for example, government failed to protect blacks
from extra-legal violence. Given our history, it's stunning that we fail to question those
who would force us to rely totally on the state for defense.

Nor should our discussion be limited to foreign or historical examples. The lives and
freedoms of decent, law-abiding citizens throughout our nation, especially in our
dangerous inner cities, are constantly threatened by criminal predators. This has
devastated minority communities. And yet the effort to limit the right to armed
self-defense has been most intense in such communities. Bans on firearm ownership in
public housing, the constant effort to ban pistols poor people can afford--scornfully
labeled "Saturday night specials" and "junk guns"--are denying the
means of self-defense to entire communities in a failed attempt to disarm criminal
predators. In many under-protected minority communities, citizens have been disarmed and
left to the mercy of well-armed criminals.

This has led to further curtailment of freedom. Consider initiatives in recent years to
require tenants in public housing to allow their apartments to be searched. First, police
failed for decades to protect citizens in many of our most dangerous public housing
projects. Next, as the situation became sufficiently desperate, tenants were prohibited
from owning firearms for their own defense. Finally the demand came, "Surrender your
right to privacy in your home." The message could not be clearer: A people incapable
of protecting themselves will lose their rights as a free people, becoming either servile
dependents of the state or of the criminal predators who are their de facto masters.

All of this should force us to reconsider our debate over arms and rights. For too
long, it has been framed as a question of the rights of sportsmen. It is far more serious:
The 2nd Amendment has something critical to say about the relationship between the citizen
and the state. For most of human history, in most of the nations in the world, the
individual has all too often been a helpless dependent of the state, beholden to the
state's benevolence and indeed competence for his physical survival.

The notion of a right to arms bespeaks a very different relationship. It says the
individual is not simply a helpless bystander in the difficult and dangerous task of
ensuring his or her safety. Instead, the citizen is an active participant, an equal
partner with the state in ensuring not only his own safety but also that of his community.

This is a serious right that takes the individual from servile dependency on the state
to the status of participating citizen, capable of making intelligent choices in defense
of life and ultimately of freedom. This conception of citizenship recognizes that the
ultimate civil right is the right to defend one's own life, that without that right all
other rights are meaningless and that without the means, the right to self-defense is but
an empty promise.

Our serious thinkers have been absent from this debate for too long. The 2nd Amendment
is too important to leave to the gun nuts.

Robert J. Cottrol
is a professor of law and history at George Washington University. His most recent book is
From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England
(M.E. Sharpe, 1998). E-mail: bcottrol@main.nlc.gwu.edu. This article is adapted from the September-October issue of American Enterprise
magazine.